


Gabriel

by ElenaRoan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Australian spelling, Canonical Character Death, Not Beta Read, Unexpectedly rendered noncanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 02:08:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11326443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElenaRoan/pseuds/ElenaRoan
Summary: Request from Angelic Spirit (from the Amino Supernatural community) for a story delving into Gabriel’s point of view. Tissues may be required.





	Gabriel

**Author's Note:**

> Story Name: Gabriel  
> Pen Name: ElenaRoan  
> Disclaimer: Don’t own any of them, written purely for enjoyment.  
> Warnings: Cannon death  
> Summary: Request from Angelic Spirit (from the Amino Supernatural community) for a story delving into Gabriel’s point of view. Tissues may be required.  
> Timeline: Pre series until season 5 (maybe)  
> Note: I wasn’t expecting where this bunny took me, and I didn’t go rewatch the episodes in question as I didn’t have time so I apologise if I misremembered something. And yes, as you can probably guess, I do take requests however if a plot bunny doesn’t bite I can’t force a story.

He felt it when they came into being, first one then the other 4 years later. He didn’t know their names, he didn’t really want to either, but he felt the satisfaction over the angel communications flavoured with the distinct sense of his oldest brother. They were doing it, they really were doing it. The scab over the wound on his very being from the fighting in his family, the scab he’d though was well buffered after eons of deliberate effort, ripped off in the blink of an eye.

He wanted to scream, to hurl his pain to the heavens in his true voice regardless of the damage it would cause. Only his iron control, honed by eons of hiding from his own family, kept him from doing so.

He felt the approval that rippled through the rest of the host, most prominently from Raphael. From the lowest rank to the highest approval emanated to greater or lesser extent. Some with distinctly sad tones, mostly from the garrisons. Way more so than the last time he’d actually paid attention to the voices of the host he noted the drifting towards one or other gender, especially among the angels with more contact with the myriad of humans on the planet. Michael was the only one he could think of who had been created already with a disposition towards a gender, intended to be the war leader and tactician he’d been male since Gabriel had awoken. Lucifer had wavered until the rift, Raphael had actually been drifting towards female until the choice was made to fall on Michael’s side. Gabriel still felt like crying in anguish at that, watching his immediately older sibling abandon the healing role that dad had given them to become Michael’s right hand…man. Gabriel himself had…experimented. Male, female, even a horse. Back when he was still so full of rage and pain but so carefree also.

He flipped himself into one of his sanctuary sub universes where he could buffer himself from the tide of approval. He wondered what the ranks would think if they knew that it wasn’t just happening but being orchestrated by the General of Heaven himself. That the host of Heaven weren’t going to be deployed to actually protect the beings that their dad had loved more than everything He’d made before them, and that was saying a lot given how much He’d loved, still loved, all His creations.

His mind wandered back to the first few centuries after he’d fled the increasingly violent altercations between his brothers. Both Michael and Lucifer had wanted him to choose one of them. When Raphael had chosen Michael the pain in Lucifer’s being was clearly visible, though it was almost overshadowed by the growing rage that all too closely resembled the pure destruction the four of them had so barely defeated in the form of their Aunt. He couldn’t choose, he loved them both. The rage in Lucifer scared him more and more, the anger that was swiftly growing to saturate Michael scared him also. Now Raphael had abandoned the healing nature s/he’d revelled in for eons. His family was disintegrating around him and no amount of desperate attempts to patch the rifts on his part was stemming the slow destruction. So he’d fled. Fled the one place he’d ever belonged, the one place where everyone he loved resided. He’d known the second his True Vessel had been born, the first of the four of them even though he was the youngest.

Initially he’d taken the young man as a vessel, travelling through the primitive tribes of humans that then populated the world, and got to know him. It was difficult, he’d never wanted to overpower another being and these were the creations that dad loved the most, but his sheer power made that difficult, made him forget to give the young man a choice sometimes and he felt the pain that suffused his vessel when that happened. It would have been easy to bury his mind, lock him away so that he neither knew nor felt what was happening around him, or chance being caught by one of his older siblings to drop his soul off in heaven. He did neither. It was the first time he’d created a sub universe but it wasn’t the last, it was still one of his favourites. They’d stayed there for days, discussing within his mind the problems and issues. He was the last of his line, the last of the Archangel line too. If something happened to him there would be no one else for Gabriel, though he could possibly take another vessel from one of his brother’s lines, but more than that Gabriel hated that he was depriving his friend and vessel of a future, a family. In one of his pain filled musings on the problem he hit on a solution; he was an archangel, he could create sub universes without feeling any strain so there was no reason he couldn’t duplicate his friend at an atomic level. Permission was still an issue but they quickly figured out that gaining permission to duplicate and inhabit the duplicate from the duplicated covered that. It was a shining ray of happiness in the utter pain that was his existence.

His friend found love, and a family, in the world while he watched over them. Choosing more and more to do so from invisibility as the years went on, when his time came he’d asked his friend to re-join him as he wouldn’t be able to visit him in heaven but it was the separation from his family that made him choose to accept his fate. His absence and that he didn’t have a back door into heaven to visit his friend was an ache that he still felt. He still knew where all members of the family were, still watched over them as only an archangel could, but he didn’t allow himself to become close to them.

He’d paid attention to the growing proliferation of myths, some had beings who’d taken the mantle or had the stories grow about them and others didn’t. They were more sketches of the myths that were to come, writing hadn’t been invented yet, but already the creativity of the beings were apparent. The stories of Loki appealed to him, a mischievous trickster who was estranged from his family. In a way it reminded him of how it had been before the rift, before the fighting, when Lucifer had truly lived up to his name. The bright sparkling humour, the rippling laugh, the light hearted pranks he pulled on the others and taught Gabriel how to do. He missed that Lucifer, before he’d turned dark. When the pranks had elicited laughter from Raphael, amused tolerance from Michael, and utter joy from Gabriel himself.

He took the identity of Loki, and the other similar identities that popped up around the world, and made it his own around the time that Lucifer was imprisoned in a cage of their dad’s devising. If he hadn’t felt his dad’s anguish that it had come to that he’d have been even more furious at Him. That didn’t stop him being angry that He hadn’t stepped in to stop it, hadn’t saved Lucifer from the rage consuming his being, hadn’t saved Michael from the anger that had burned the compassion out of him, and hadn’t saved Raphael from losing his way.

His experiments had made it into the myths and legends and even been embellished on. Male and female had never meant much to him, over the eons he’d found himself reverting more and more to male though, his friend his vessel being the draw for that. He’d stopped being so enamoured with the Loki legend and drifted into the other legends when they started attributing Loki the same role in his legends as Lucifer filled in the apocalypse prophecies. How anyone could think he wanted the world burnt to a cinder he couldn’t fathom.

Though he’d taken great delight in upsetting the staunchly patriarchal societies when he could. That was becoming less and less of a controlling force in the world and he loved that, loved the growth he’d seen through the eons, loved the awareness they’d reached of their own being regardless of where it was; intellectually, sexually, physically, emotionally. He loved it all, he loved what humans had become, what they were still becoming. It had become a balm to the gaping wound on his being to the point where he had nearly forgotten it was there. There were still those who needed to learn compassion, needed to learn how to treat people right and equally, but humanity was getting there.

And now…they had less than a human lifetime, and pain threatened to smother his being again.

He kept doing what he’d been doing when he emerged from his sub universe, what else was he supposed to do…he certainly wasn’t going to go sign up with either side, but with more urgency than he’d felt in centuries.

He should have been more careful, too many too close together had to have been what put it on the Hunter’s radar. He’d faced a few over the years, even planted the information on what the ‘effective’ weapon was, but it was too much bother most of the time. He was interested in teaching people to be better, though admittedly many times it was teaching those around his examples how to be better people, not removing the all too small a group people who dedicated their lives to protecting others from what lurked in the dark corners of the world. Even if they persisted in including him in that description.

The instant he saw them he knew who and what they were. Just his luck that he’d attract not just good Hunters but the true vessels of his two brothers, the humans both heaven and hell had worked to bring into being, the two who were destined to bring about the end of the world.

For an instant he was sorely tempted to scorch them from the fabric of existence. He didn’t though, for one it would alert his brothers to his location and neither Michael nor Raphael would allow him to vanish again after attempting something like that. He’d be lucky just to get an archangel sword to the chest. And secondly it wouldn’t accomplish anything, anything he could do to kill them Michael could just undo.

His anger near blinded him and he started messing with them. At first it was just anger, then he realised if he could make them angry enough at each other the dangerous events that heaven and hell needed them to do couldn’t happen.

He thought he’d succeeded, they headed to completely opposite goals, maybe even to completely different parts of the country if he’d got lucky. He had no real illusions that it would keep the brothers apart for long, he’d have to keep at it if he wanted that. It was both a pleasant and unpleasant surprise when they confronted him with another Hunter. They’d tricked him, the one who’d defined pranks and tricks, the one who’d had eons to perfect them. They’d actually managed to trick him. Maybe they could thwart heaven and hell after all.

He watched them leave invisibly before cleaning up the mess the battle had produced and munched on a chocolate bar. His friend had loved sweet things and Gabriel had modified the interface between the taste buds and his being first to allow him to continue to experience it then to share it with him, it was all he had to remind him of the young man who’d first showed him the wonder of humanity.

For the first time he had hope that maybe the course his siblings had set themselves on could be derailed.

He felt the instant that Sam died, the instant that he returned to life, and the instant the dark cloud settled on Dean. He nearly screamed to the heavens again as he felt the satisfaction flow from Michael, it was more restrained than the first time, kept from the general angel population, but not even archangels could prevent another archangel from feeling that.

He should have told them, explained what he knew, what was being forced on them. Now the first wheels had been set in motion and there was nothing he or anyone else could do to stop it. He was going to lose the humankind that he loved; the vibrancy, the colour, the creativity, the hope. He should have taught them long ago to move on with their lives if either died, he’d messed up. And now everyone was going to pay the price.

When they rolled into the town that was the site of his latest, admittedly rather vicious, lesson he couldn’t resist trying to teach the lesson he should have taught them long ago.

It was never intended to go forever, though for a bit he’d started to wonder whether he’d overestimated their intelligence and that he’d have to jump out at them to get them to realise what was going on.

The six months that he left Dean dead were eye opening. He’d already had a fairly good feel for what Dean would do, he was a product of the Michael line after all and he’d already seen how he could make split second decisions in the midst of battle. Without Sam it hadn’t taken more than a day before he’d sacrificed himself to bring him back. But Sam without Dean was…scary was not a word normally in Gabriel’s vocabulary. Sam was a product of the Lucifer line and he hadn’t really thought about what that meant but more than that he hadn’t thought about what mixing the lines would mean. In any other circumstances he’d have held out hope that it would bring to the surface the best traits of the archangels they shadowed, the Lucifer line had been much more likely to be protectors and Hunters during its existence than murderers or the like. Until John the Michael line had been more likely to gravitate towards directing from behind the lines, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing; too easy to relegate fellow human being to mere statistics and counters on a board, the down side of Michael’s gift.

Sam completely and utterly refused to give up on his brother, then he did something that Gabriel had never expected from the Lucifer line even without the pressure being brought to bear on the young man from both sides. He begged for his brother.

Even as he quipped something in keeping with Loki and dissolved his time construct he wanted to cry, to howl his anguish and pain to the heavens.

He retreated to his favourite sub universe as Sam clasped his brother to him. He’d missed it. If he’d just sought them out, told them who he really was, what he knew, they might have been able to avoid the whole thing. Not even an archangel could change the past and now there was nothing he could do to change it. He’d been a fool.

It was months before he emerged again and he only did so because in a twisted way he owed them to watch the next inevitable step in the descent to the apocalypse, even as inside he cried at what they’d all lose. He couldn’t stop it, the point when a little knowledge, a little intervention, could divert it had passed without him even being aware of it. He felt the moment when the hellhounds dragged Dean to hell.

He felt it when the warriors of heaven dragged Dean back to earth four months later. He also knew that they hadn’t been given the orders to retrieve him until the seal had broken. Any hope he’d had curled up and died.

He was lacklustre in his lessons now, it was rather pointless when the family he loved was determined to tear apart this beautiful world.

Both heaven and hell tried to set the brothers at each other’s throats, Gabriel could have told them it was useless. It had been the thing he’d tried first after all. The rift they drove between them might well be permanent, as much as anything could be with less than a decade left, but they couldn’t separate them.

He felt it when Lucifer escaped the cage even as he felt like he was watching the world stumble towards its end through a veil of tears. It wasn’t until he felt Sam’s own anguish, unable to be contained, that he realised that the only way they’d got the young man to do so was by telling him it would prevent Lucifer’s release. They hadn’t needed to get him to do that, the seal only specified her death after all.

It was more surprising that they vanished from being sensed by any angel a short while later. It would have given him hope that they were refusing to be involved in the destruction of the world but he knew it was inevitable now. He just wanted it to be over already, he wanted an end to the torture of watching a world he loved being torn asunder slowly.

Wandering about randomly he ran across a man whose temper touched off his own. He wasn’t real sure what landed the incident on the brothers’ radar but he was definitely surprised when they came into town investigating it. Even more perplexing was when Sam figured out it was him and they decided to try contacting him. What the younger brother thought that would achieve Gabriel couldn’t fathom. The only chance at peace for anyone was to get it over with, ‘cause there was no stopping it.

A point he tried to drive into their skulls. With about as much success as the other times he’d set out to teach one or other of them something. One day they’d stop being other than he expected, though it was more likely the apocalypse would destroy the world first. This time it was Dean who figured it out, and Gabriel realised he’d made the mistake all too many had made; Dean wasn’t dumb. That was very apparent when he found himself in a ring of holy fire. They knew who he was now but they didn’t understand how useless fighting was at this point.

He supposed he should be grateful they didn’t leave him stuck in the ring of fire to watch the world disintegrate around him unable to even hide. And hide was exactly what he did for a bit, retreating to one of his sub universes.

Eventually he emerged though, unable to just allow the humanity he loved be dragged into the night without bearing witness to its last desperate struggles.

The majority of heaven was actually on earth in one form or another, the general chatter revolved around trying to locate the vessels and force them to start cooperating. He half wondered whether he should track down his friend’s family, a quick death at his hands had to be better than the slow torturous one the apocalypse would visit on them. Not even evacuating them all to one of his sub universes would spare them that.

Then it hit him that after all these eons heaven was virtually unpopulated, if he was careful he could slip in to see his friend one last time. Once the world had been obliterated by the apocalypse he’d have nowhere left to hide after all and would end up in heaven’s jail if he wasn’t killed outright, he would almost prefer to be killed outright.

His friend greeted him with a hug when he slipped into his heaven. Gabriel just held him tightly to him as the despair of the events in the world he couldn’t protect washed through him.

Slowly, haltingly, he explained to his friend what was going on. Explained to the only person in the cosmos who could understand his pain, for it was he who’d felt the soul shattering pain he’d been in when he first sought him out in a world very different to the one that now existed. He told him of the beauty and wonder humankind had become capable of, he told him of all that was going to be lost, and he told him of how he’d missed the clue that would have let the brothers avoid it all.

Then his friend reminded him of the human spirit, that insatiable drive to fight despite the odds, the will that sometimes led them to survive and even triumph against even things that seem insurmountable. The intrinsic part of humans without which they’d have never emerged from the first caves they’d sheltered in.

It was with that in his mind as he slipped out of heaven, a summons from several pagan gods who knew him as Loki was waiting for him. Sam and Dean were there too and this time he really listened to them. Maybe his friend was right, maybe they really could tell heaven, hell, and anyone else who tried to dictate to them to go jump. If they were going to have a chance at derailing this unstoppable juggernaut he needed to do what he should have done after their first meeting, he needed to give them all the knowledge he had. And he needed to live up to the faith his friend had in him.

He nearly succeeded. His last thought as Lucifer’s blade came towards him, as the brother he’d loved, still loved even as twisted as he’d become, wiped him from existence was that at least he’d tried. There were so many who hadn’t, who couldn’t. And one last message from the messenger of God waited for the Winchester brothers.


End file.
